The Test team patrols, curates, and tests the WordPress experience. We use a QA mindset to do visual records, using, observing, user research, manual testing, and user testing. We also document and triage top flows.

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Shiny Updates Visual Records

In preparation for proposing parts of Shiny Updates v2 to be included with WordPress 4.6, I assembled visual records of the various flows and interactions that the plugin touches.

There are six interactions across ten locations throughout the admin where plugins and themes can be installed/updated/deleted. I created two videos to illustrate the changes for the most common use cases on a single site: plugin install/bulk update/delete, theme install/update/delete. For multisite I took screenshots on mobile and for the actions that differ from single sites.

Actually installing the plugin or theme is only a small part of the server request for it. You can observe that in the video above too, where it takes a while to navigate to The Bleak Screen of Sadness, but the status updates of the installation are being printed out very quickly. I agree, having to watch the spinner for a while, especially when installing/updating large plugins, is not very satisfactory. Unfortunately it can not be accurately predicted how long the entire request ill take, which makes a progress indicator less useful.

Great! How are errors displayed (error activating plugin)? What about if FTP credentials are required for installing a theme/plugin (no php write permissions on theme/plugin folders)?

Please test how it works when installing something like WooCommerce. Woo (and other themes/plugins) like to redirect the next browser request to a welcome screen, which can make ajax operations a little unreliable. (e.g. test installing/updating 3 plugins with woocommerce as the second plugin to process).

I added records for errors in plugin and theme install errors, as well as FTP credentials.

Shiny Updates does not change the way how activations work for exactly the reason you outlined above: Plugins redirect on subsequent page loads and that can lead to jarring experiences when navigating away from the plugins screen after activating a plugin.

Regarding Batch updating of installed plugins, though, I believe that the select menu could be friendlier. For example, I think it that the buttons “update”, “activate”, “deactivate” and “delete” could just be a simple horizontal list. Buttons would be inactive if no plugin is selected and active when one or more plugins were checked. Here’s a small screenshot of what I suggest:

That way we could minimize the number of clicks to perform an action from 4 (check, select, option, apply) to just 2 (check, apply). We could also make it even smarter by keeping, for example, the “activate” button disabled if all checked plugins are already active.

Thanks for your suggestion! While this type of change is probably a little outside of the scope of Shiny Updates v2, #31634-core might be a good spot to propose that, it deals with the UI around bulk actions.